Finding Silver
by Lady Altair
Summary: There are a lot of silver linings to be had. Percy Weasley's trying to find his. PercyxAudrey


**NOTE: **This piece is not related to my other Percy-fics. I know a lot of my pieces tend to interweave and/or take place in the same sort of 'universe', if you know what I mean, but this one is entirely separate! I wanted to play around with some of JKR's post epilogue reveals, of which I am generally not a fan of, but this was fun.

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_Silver Lining_

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A week after they bury Fred, Percy visits the grave. It's a beautifully sunny day and even the scattered grey rain clouds are sparse, casting a rare, roving shadow over the rows, sprinkling down light, misty rain and little girls in the village over the hill scan the sky for rainbows. It's that sort of day. There are a lot of silver linings to be had. Percy's trying to find his.

It's a scarce hunting ground in the graveyard. Fred's headstone is before him, neatly carved and simple; just the name and the dates, as no one wanted to make the decision to add anything else.

Percy just stands before it, hands in his pockets, his eyes trained on the granite, the sun warm on his scalp. This isn't a goodbye—can you ever really say goodbye to someone like this? This isn't guilt—he's beginning to work through that, if only for Molly's sake; she's already lost a son, no good to sacrifice himself on useless, wasteful guilt. It's just a visit, really. If anything, maybe he's looking for direction (not that this is a good place to come for it, but he's not sure there's anywhere better). There's a lot of direction at work—they're putting the pieces of the Ministry back together, and he's never had more work, more responsibility, more purpose. It's when he comes home he's a little lost.

Graveyards are supposed to be peaceful. Instead, the air is rent with an infant wail, an angry, helpless scream that pauses only for a scarce few seconds, just long enough for a deep, silent inhale. Irritation and slight worry (who leaves an infant crying like that? In a cemetery?) sharpens a point and his gaze darts around, following the sound.

He can't see a thing, the rows of memorials obstructing the view, so his feet carry him to the source.

There's a woman sitting on the ground, her back to a tombstone, the child whose shrieks are ringing through the otherwise empty, peaceful cemetery of Ottery St. Catchpole is curled on her chest, its tiny face flooded with furious red and crinkled up in woe. She's utterly silent as her little boy, dressed in a little green sleepsuit sprinkled with blue stars, writhes in misery on her chest, bawling.

Percy loses his nerve and, hoping she hasn't heard his approach, makes to turn and go.

"I'm sorry," her voice calls out, surprisingly steady and strong. "He has colic and there's nothing that will stop him screaming." She's looking at him when he turns around to look, and though there are vague traces of tears down her face, she seems composed enough. She looks very, very young and terribly exhausted, her eyes ringed under with purpling smudges, sitting there in the grass, a headstone behind her and a red-faced, very unhappy baby in her arms.

"It's no problem," is all that he can summon up. He's frozen in spot.

"My husband was much better at this," she explains quietly, looking up at him. All I had to do was hand him Daniel and he'd quiet right down." That's all it takes, the tenses she uses in the sentence, and Percy knows exactly whose grave she's leaning against. "I thought he might quiet down out here." She gestures vaguely at the grave. With a little bit of squinting through his spectacles, he can read part of the inscription over her shoulder: Samuel Fawcett. The neighbor boy Charlie'd gotten into trouble with now and then before Hogwarts. His mother had given the boy a scolding or two alongside Charlie; unlike Charlie, he'd always seemed genuinely repentant. "Now there's a nice boy," his mother would murmur. He was the kind of boy who brought your mum flowers from his mum's garden when he stayed over for dinner.

He's still standing there, not really knowing why, when the rain starts to mist down. "Should go in," he mumbles, turning to go again.

"It'll clear in a little," she says, her voice thin and clear like a ceramic bell. She seems very sure, although she wraps a blanket tightly around Daniel, cuddling him to her chest. "Why don't you sit down?"

It seems like a sound idea. He sits down next to her against the broad headstone. "How old is he?" he asks. That's the question you ask with babies, he thinks. It's what he remembers hearing over and over again when he went shopping with his mum when Ginny was a baby. The crying has mellowed slightly, no longer so insistent and shrill.

"He'll be three weeks on Friday." She smiles down at the infant, still fretting softly in his warm, dry cocoon.

They sit in quiet for a while, the only sound the crying that begins to gradually pick up again as the rain cloud scoots away into the blue sky, leaving the sun to shine back down. Then her hand is on his arm. "Here," she says, and offers him the baby. He takes it without thinking.

Percy has always been awkward. He thinks too much, preferring process to instinct. He hasn't held a baby since Ginny got big enough to squeal 'no!' and wiggle like a flobberworm. He thought he would be awkward with babies. It would just be another thing on the list.

The little boy settles into his arms like he belongs there and after a moment the crying ceases altogether.

"He likes you," she says, looking over at her calm son in Percy's arms. She nods, settling back against the headstone, her fingers braiding themselves into the short grass at her side.

He's a little boggled. Who is this woman, handing around her newborn son to strangers in a graveyard? "What…why—" he breaks off asking, his eyes still locked on the little breathing bundle in his arms, as the boy's eyelids slide shut.

"You seemed like you needed a silver lining. You seemed sad."

"Aren't you?" he asks, his gaze training back on the tracks down her cheeks.

"Well, yes, of course." She has such a peaceful voice. "But sadness is like rain. And that," she gestures to the now-sleeping baby in his arms, "is my sun." She grimaces, crinkling her nose up, and points up to the sky. "I meant like that sun, not the 'my child is a boy' son. Pardon the pun, that was entirely unintentional. I meant, in my overdone-metaphor gone horribly wrong, that he's going to make a rainbow for me." She shakes her head, a little smile threatening on her face. "I'm not normally this trite, I've just been talking to myself a lot lately. Haven't had many real conversations, and that all sounded very meaningful when I was telling it to myself a few days ago, and Daniel hasn't got the verbal skills to set me straight. Let me try again…without another metaphor." She clears her throat, casting her eyes upward in recollection.

"Some sadness is good, because good wouldn't be good without it. But you need to have a reason to see the sadness through, to make it out the other side. That's mine, that's what me and Sam made and I can't think of anything more worth seeing the bright side for. Maybe you haven't found yours yet; I thought I'd share mine until you do." She finishes with a grin, and he sees maybe a flash of what she'll be when the rain cloud's shadow is past.

She's not tranquil, or peaceful. She's bright and funny and beautifully contagious, the person who dislikes few and makes you feel special in a crowd. She smiles, her long brown hair falling across his arm as she reaches a finger over to stroke Daniel's cheek, tucking the blanket more tightly around him.

"What a strange place to make a friend," she muses, leaning back against the granite. Her eyes are a hazel of the more bluish variety and Percy has the strangest idea that if everything he already has to see through isn't silver enough a lining, bright enough a sun, then it's this woman sitting beside him, the boy in his arms.

"I'm Percy," he manages, trying to return some sense of reality to this almost-surreal encounter.

"Audrey," she returns. They sit quietly until the sun grows too low to warm them any longer, and then Percy walks her home.

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**NOTES: **Can someone explain why when a document is uploaded to ff.n, it duplicates a portion of the first sentence? It's really annoying!

Also, to credit. This piece was inspired by a photograph I saw of a war widow lying prostrate on her husband's grave. It broke my heart.


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